Friday, April 18, 2008

The Value of Failure

I've always been afraid to fail. In fact, I largely attribute my successes as a result of being afraid of failing, rather than enjoying success itself. Recently, there was a design at work that failed miserably during testing. Even though it failed, the design was still approved and is going live very soon. I had the opportunity to re-design it for a couple of projects I was working on. My manager said that we would tag the designs and see which one does better. The old fear of failure starting come back in waves. I fought really hard to redesign this product, and now it was time to see if I was right. One of my managers once told me, "If you wanted to know the right answer, you should go into Math."

Success is kind of a double edged sword. If you don't put yourself out there and take the risk, you'll never know if there is a big payoff. On the other side of that, if you put yourself out there, than you risk being publicly wrong and possibly endure a failure. At the end of the day, I decided that I've had many monumental failures in my life. And from those, I learned priceless lessons. I consider my time in New York City a failure. I failed at almost everything while I was there, and battled depression to boot. Yet, from that failure I learned from the mistakes I made in my career, in my friendships, and learned a lot about who am I am, and more importantly, who I am not.

I am positive that I will endure more failures in my life. I've never been the type to fly under the radar. And that's okay. I know the successes will be much sweeter.